The BodySnatchers
by Ryuujitsu
Summary: Ryou wonders why he has never thought of gouging out his eyes. Dark, drabblefic, slash. Necrophilia...sort of.


cake and confucius  
yuugiou fanfiction  
ryuujitsu & co.

A/N: Despite the cutesy title, this drabblefic is kind of dark and sarcastic. I tried hard for fluff, TRT-sama, but it was no good. Bad me for not giving you a present on time. But here it is, two months late.

Disclaimer: Saying we own Yuugiou is like saying we didn't forget to write this disclaimer. Oops. Thanks for reminding us, hehe.

-

Ryou has never thought about gouging out his eyes. He realizes that early on Sunday morning, staring into the mirror with a blue toothbrush dangling from his mouth and the bruises of another late night purpling around his eyelids. His mouth is torn and bleeding red. Under the flickering light, the skin around his nose appears green and yellow; add the toothbrush and suddenly he's a goddamned rainbow, he thinks sourly. And the eyes are green too; his father's eyes gone flat and cold, new lines every morning.

Bakura has often said, sullenly, that this body—Ryou's body, really—is dying. Another reason why Ryou finds it so dreadfully amusing that Bakura, clutching at the last shreds of independence, resides in a real corpse now, some poor fool dug up and made whole. Occasionally Ryou can taste the rot on his own breath, but that is to be expected, when one shares a mind with a cadaver and kisses it from time to time, too. Nothing toothpaste can't kill, though, and he's thankful. But he remembers the real panic in Bakura's voice, that first night. Three thousand years spent thinking _big_, thinking like a _god_, and then human mortality wraps around him like a python, crushes him.

But then, Ryou reflects, it didn't matter. Bakura has always had a way of getting around things.

From the edge of the sink, Ryou takes a nail file—metal and ridged and pointed enough to be menacing. He toys with it, balances it on the back of his hand, watching not the file but the fine weave of veins below his skin. There is a relatively large bruise where his hand meets his wrist; it's fresh and Ryou pauses to wonder at it. His father's hands are a leathery brown, tanned from days spent in Egypt in the sun and sand. Good honest work, perhaps, but Ryou has always—_always_—been glad that their hands look nothing alike.

Bakura might say he has a girlish sort of face, but Ryou knows he looks like his father, who is in all the grainy old photographs that litter the apartment in cheap silver frames, the pictures of woman and girl and man with strange peppery hair and round child's eyes. But the moment is broken and Ryou tosses the file aside, saving his eyes. He doesn't fancy reanimating someone else's optic nerves in his own empty sockets; too much trouble, especially when blinded, and he's had enough of playing mad scientist.

He'd gone to bed just around two that morning, hadn't bothered with switching off the light. Return to life was sometime around five and painful, vague city sounds swimming across his ears. The light bulb glittered like a distant gem, searing through a migraine.

Now he remembers—Dad's coming home today. Dad wants to meet me for dinner. Dad—and he can _see_ the man frowning already, _You're still unemployed?_

Ryou splashes water on his face, feels his skin prickling with the cold that hits when he straightens. The Ring is heavy around his neck; it does not help the headache. He smears wetness across his face with a forearm, spits, wipes away toothpaste deliberately and bends down for another dunking.

-

Ryou comes into the kitchen for something to drink and finds a half-emptied sack on the table, bleeding grimy slips of paper and a fine, gravelly soil that crumbles like sand between his fingers. Under the dirt and slime Ryou can distinguish some color, soft pinks and oranges: these are bills; big money, but why the grave dirt?

He hears a grinding crash and several muffled curses, and turns to find Bakura wrestling with the fire escape, a black shape against the lightening sky.

"Good morning," Ryou says distinctly, and Bakura straightens, letting the fire escape fall with another violent crash. Bakura's gait is somewhat lopsided, but swift, and he is next to Ryou in moments, shaking the bag until it vomits more paper. Ryou stands by as he sifts through clumps of dirt and bills, watching as they spill onto the floor. He counts the zeroes and the number of fingernails that Bakura is missing.

Six, on both counts, and he shudders a bit at the sight of the seventh, blackened and loose and hanging as though from broken hinges.

The hands are two different colors, something of a jolt to see—_ah, that's right, he got an arm crushed when he died_, and Ryou can't help thinking _we did a neat sew-up on that one, clever, really—_

Bakura follows his eyes down to his damaged and rotting hands and grins, unabashed. It is the corpse's smile, and the mouth is small, somewhat crooked as it curves into a grimace nothing like the wide Cheshire smirk that haunts his mind still. The teeth are not as white, nor are they as sharp, and the eyes that snapped once with black fire are dulled into brown, though the embers still smolder. Ryou is only briefly surprised; but then, so many years suffering imperfection must have killed that peacock vanity. Maybe Bakura is just tired, tired like they are all tired after so long. They have all, Ryou thinks, lived far longer than they ever imagined people could live in their time. And now that they are nearing twenty or three thousand fifteen or past it, what on earth—what _the hell_ are they going to do with themselves?

"That's disgusting," he says next, unsure of whether he is referring to the mud-caked bills or Bakura's decaying fingertips. _Good honest work._

Bakura laughs, a wheezing rush from lungs that have forgotten how to breathe. His new face, yellow-tinged at the cheekbones, is crinkled with amusement. The eyes are big and dark with some semblance of a slant to them, getting wider and wider with each wheeze of laughter. No doubt the blaze Ryou sees there is some trick of the mind; there is defeat and a certain weariness in the fine lines that surround each eye and the creases developing across both their foreheads. Bakura has always preferred to take bodies that are Ryou's age, but when this one decomposes beyond repair, Ryou imagines the next will be one far older, a grown man, perhaps. Bakura has always liked to have the upper hand, and they have never been afraid of a head of white hair, after all.

Ryou figures that Bakura will keep up this corpse-hopping thing; hell, he'll probably take Ryou's body once Ryou's soul is allowed to vacate. Ryou is fine with this. He'd write it into his will if he'd ever bothered to have one. He's never felt more hollow; even during the sex he can't get close enough and it will be fitting to let Bakura have his shell when he goes—_together again._

Bakura mutters something in his old tongue, a word that rings bitter and warped from a mouth that, for twenty-three years until the motor accident, did not know how to shape it. "I know," he says, still amused. "If you hate it so much, why don't you stitch me up?"

"Why don't we get you a new body?" Ryou mumbles. The transfer takes a day and night, and Bakura usually insists on spending another six hours soaking in the shower, wincing as the lukewarm water brings feeling back to clammy, dead limbs. Cheating death and stealing bodies. If this doesn't warrant some massive karmic bite in the ass later, then Ryou doesn't know what does. They are living day to day and every hour he imagines divine retribution, crashing down around them; a flood, maybe. The end of the apartment one day in some freak fire. Ryou will burn up, the money will burn up, Bakura and his dead body will go to ashes and the Ring will melt. Their neighbors above and below will say, _He was such a quiet boy._ _We barely knew him. _As Ryou thinks about this, anxiety begins to build in his tone. He realizes that he is whining, petulant, but goes on anyway. "Why did you ever need a new body? Why did you leave?" He jerks his hand at the money piled on the table. "Where the hell did you get this?"

Bakura ignores all questions but the first. "Sure," he says easily, though his eyes blaze hostility. "Why don't you come down to the graveyard with me and point out the one you like best. Even better—why don't you pick someone who's not rotting apart?"

Ryou breathes in sharply and stares at him, thinks, _Aha, we're going to hell, me and the fucking bodysnatcher. The ninth circle is just for us. _Aloud, he says, "N-not rotting?" and curses himself for the little-boy waver in his voice.

Bakura's voice is hard. "Yeah, that's right," he says. "You pick one you like, go up to him and toss the Ring round his neck. I come back all nice and alive, no parts falling off—will that make you happy, you stupid child?" He begins looking through the bills on the table, sorting them into piles.

For a moment, Ryou is aghast. There is nothing wrong with the idea. It is entirely feasible. It does not involve killing, not really; a restriction of someone else's soul, not exactly painless, but it's not killing. He remembers, though, the dark heat of Bakura's presence in his mind—_give that to someone else? Give him to someone else?_ He decides that it can't be done, because even standing in the kitchen so close that their shoulders are brushing they aren't close enough—_someone else and not me?_

Bakura must have seen the shimmer of hurt in Ryou's eyes; he gives a satisfied chuckle. "That's what I thought," he says, and moves closer so that he is pressing against Ryou's back, one hand curved soft around his throat, holding him like that. "What's the matter with this body?" he whispers with papery lips against the skin of Ryou's neck, and Ryou feels goose bumps erupting into life across his back, arms, stomach, scalp. "Gets the job done, doesn't it? Don't you like it?"

Shivering, Ryou shrugs him off and heads for the door. "I have to meet Dad for dinner," and never mind that it's fourteen hours too early.

"Wait," says Bakura, catching him by the back pockets of his jeans, spinning Ryou back against the table. He grabs a multicolored wad of bills, straightens them out, and stuffs them into one pocket. Bits of dirt and the seventh fingernail crumble off his hands. Already Bakura is reaching past the front pockets, reaching for the zipper. His left hand is rubbing circles in the small of Ryou's back. "Wait a sec. It's been three days. Don't you want. . .?"

"Fuck you," Ryou says. Excuses push against his mouth and he lets them tumble out. "I have to go. It's too early. I'm out of toothpaste. I have to leave _now_," he says insistently. He tugs away and goes out before he can be caught again.

-

Bakura does catch him again, much later, holds him against a wall with a cage made from his body. Arms and legs like iron bars, immovable. For a moment Ryou struggles like a maddened animal, then accepts it, draws Bakura in. It is just as Bakura said, after all—it has been three days. The Ring warms as it is pressed between them, and he thinks, drawing a ragged breath, flinching toward Bakura's fingers, maybe this time—

-

Nervously, Ryou tugs his collar higher to hide the marks on his neck, but his father is engrossed with the menu and does not look up. "They're frying ice cream and roasting ducks with jam," Yaten Bakura reads, one peppery eyebrow raising, more of a lament than anything. "Where the hell do they come up with these things? Throw some things in a pan, give it a name, here it sits on the menu. You might be good at that sort of thing." Yaten has never fully accepted Ryou's terror of Egyptian artifacts. Archaeology is in the blood in their family. They have been discovering mummies in the long-supposed barren Valley of Kings for three generations. Since Bakura, since Yuugi, since Pharaoh and Malik, though, Ryou has had no affinity for the land or his family trade. He sure as hell hates digging up bodies.

Ryou says nothing. Three or four years ago he might have answered, but he has learned since. He is the last son. Their tradition will die with him, if Bakura decides to let him die.

Their waitress is short and pathetically shy, with hair like the cinnamon he sees sprinkled across cafe lattes; she reminds him, painfully, of Shizuka. He meets her eyes when he orders, which are unexpectedly green like his, and nothing like the soft blue or brown that are Shizuka's, and she gives a queer little gasp. Ryou wonders, paranoid, if she knows—if she can see the grave dirt under his fingernails, knows what he has done, what he has been doing. Her name card reads Ayano, and he wonders, vaguely, again paranoid, if he should kill her to keep Bakura's secret. Their secret. He can do it, he thinks, and her neck doesn't look that thick. A quick squeeze—one-handed, even—would finish it. The realization of what he is plotting flips his stomach, but this has all happened in a matter of seconds, and he smiles back at her gasp and repeats his order, and wipes his hands on his pants. She fumbles with their menus and will later knock over the salt.

Yaten switches to the second favorite topic—if he can't have a master archaeologist, he'll at least want grandchildren. Ryou has no intention of passing on these green eyes. He is tired of talking. He mentions a girl named Ayano, whose eyes are blue, who has a mole on the inside of her knee, much like Bakura's body does. He is sure his father will appreciate the details. Yaten does; last year the girl was Ichiko, and Yaten likes the idea of having a playboy, maybe even more than he does grandchildren. Means the boy is taking after him. Just like the old man.

Ryou wonders now why he has never thought of gouging out his father's eyes. _Mom died alone._

Ayano brings their food with hands that tremble, and Ryou steadies the salt shaker, just in case. Yaten frowns at her as she sets down their plates. "Inexperienced," he says to Ryou in English, and snorts. "I don't know what they were thinking, hiring a girl like her." Ayano's face erupts into a sticky flush, and she flees the table. Yaten coughs.

Ryou eats savagely, like the survivor of a famine, and hopes that he will never see Ayano again after tonight, never have to strangle her.

"Really, I'm only worried about you," says Yaten Bakura, drawing his wallet from his pocket as he scans the bill. "You've got some dead-end job—marry the girl, will you? Get a haircut. Settle her down, babies are key. I want to see those green-eyed little tykes running around."

_Mom died alone, _Ryou thinks. "It's alright," he says. He calls Ayano over. "It's alright," he goes on. "I'm your son. I'm rolling in money. Don't bother. Did you know that she raved at me, before she died? She thought I was you. She wanted to know who Claire was. Margaret, Anna, all of them. Why I abandoned her. Why Amane was dead. Did you know, Amane is dead? Because of my eyes. I dream about them, sometimes." He is pulling the bills from his back pocket where Bakura put them earlier, slapping them onto the table one by one, watching their mouths slacken. There is dirt under his fingernails; Ayano has probably seen this. "I have a job. I work with the government. I'm your son. Here," he says, pressing it into Ayano's hands. The looks on their faces do not register; he babbles on. "Keep the change. Keep it all. I'm rich. I'm filthy rich. I'm going home, Dad. I don't want to see you again, either of you."

He repeats himself, backing away from them, speeding up as his father half-rises, slowing as the man sits again, staring at the grubby bills. Ayano won't stop looking at him, and he almost panics, thinking that they will have to kill her after all, because she looks like Shizuka and knows everything about him.

-

When Bakura finds out what Ryou has done—and it's easy to reach into Ryou's mind and pluck out the choice bits; it always has been—he laughs. Ryou laughs too, and dissolves into hysterical tears. Bakura fucks him in the kitchen while he is still crying, chuckling at the desperate hiccups and embraces, and Yaten's telephone call goes unanswered.

"He was wrong," says Ryou some time later. "I love corpses. I do," he insists, childishly, as Bakura laughs again. "Better than ghosts. And I want you to come back to me," he says solemnly to Bakura, pressing their foreheads together until it hurts. "I miss you."

"No," says Bakura. "This is fine."

-

A/N: I said to Schleicher, "I will have this done by Sunday night." So here it is. I have really no idea what I wanted to accomplish with this, but it was fun to write. Did you like it, or do you think it was a waste of your time?


End file.
